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Who really makes plumbing/hvac tools?

10-03-2007, 08:55 PM

After looking at other companies tools, I notice striking similarities between company tools. I.E. Ridgid makes a flaring tool that looks like a model that Reed and Rothenberger sell. Ritchie imp tubing cutters look like a reed model. Ritchie has one handed tubing bender that looks the same as a rothenberger model. Rothenberger makes a swaging tool that Wirsbo markets as their own. The list goes on and on and if you look around you'll see countless examples.

So who is this big parent company that makes these tools and sells them off to companies to market as their own?

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Nope. We make most of our tubing tools in Orange, Virginia. There are lots of similarities, and our marketing guys can tell you that we spend a bunch of money protecting our intellectual properties and copyrights. Look how many companies *almost* copy the machined chevron on the pipe wrenches. look at Reed's pipe stands, threaders, etc. We (RIDGID) are the benchmark in most of these products, and other companies copy them to piggyback on that reputation.

(I once saw a competing product that had cast bosses exactly like one of our machines. So what, you ask? Well, we had stopped using those bosses several years earlier, but didn't go to the expense to change the casting tooling. So they copied something so exactly that they copied useless features! )